Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the speaker, and not about the things that are being spoken of.

There are a number of people trying to give short definitions of science on the blogs right now (see here). I have a one line definition that I think captures everything I want it to, and nothing else:

Science is the process of saying as much as one can about measurable (empirical) phenomena in as simple a model as possible. Or more simply, science says as much as it can in as short a sentence as possible.

“Science is the process of saying as much as one can about measurable (empirical) phenomena in as simple a model as possible. Or more simply, science says as much as it can in as short a sentence as possible.”

Well these aren’t equivalent, so it’s hard to say how the latter is a simpler expression of the former. Probably building models (mathematical, conceptual, etc) is closer to what one really wants done in the sciences.

Isn’t it clear anyway that the latter is not quite what one wants. For, is the idea that we ignore any constraints on the background language that gives the sentence meaning? If so then “gleb = blarg”is a pretty short, maximally informative sentence on the assumption that we define “gleb” and “blarg” properly. So science is now complete and all we have left is the trivial task of constructing the right language—by Wilkins’ stipulation, not part of science. If we don’t ignore such constraints then we seem to be in the position of saying that “science says as much as it can in as short a sentence as possible” with the proviso that we do so in some specified language. Or maybe the idea will be to construct, using various tools (math, logic, etc) languages that do allow such maximally informative short sentences. (Perhaps like Lavoisier’s interpretation of Condillac?) Isn’t stuff like this what derailed certain of the logical empiricists?

Perhaps we’d be better off concentrating more on science’s active search for and responsiveness to data in its attempt to construct its models. And it wouldn’t hurt to keep in mind that sometimes the right thing to do is to allow the models to be more complicated than is immediately necessary, in order to facilitate future theory construction.

I wouldn’t hazard a formal definition, but just to get the flavor right, I’ll sugggest that (empirical) science is the art of framing questions about phenomena in a way that permits experiment/experience to limit the range of acceptable answers.